So one of my stranger interests is Chiptunes. Chiptunes is a gnere of music characterized more by the technology used to make it than by any particular style. The reason is because the technology places a huge limit on the music produced. Basically, huge nerds either dig the sound controller chips out of their old nintendos or use special software to hijack the chip in their gameboy (etc.) to make music.
It can get kinda strange sometiems, but in general I think the music is pretty cool, and the idea is really cool. One of the really neat things about the whole scene is that since it's such an underground (read as: "no one but them gives a shit") scene, just about every artist involved provides their music for free either through their personal or label webpages. one label I particularly like is www.8bitpeoples.com , a label that makes their entire discography available for free download.
I actually first discovered chiptunes through that label. I had just discovered the website www.rocketboom.com , a Vlog that sort of does the news and is responsible for that annoying "ask a ninja" podcast. I was watching a video on rocketboom where they were describing this neat experiment someone did with an NES game called Gradius where they overlayed 15 people playing the game to observe patterns and successful strategies (the experiment was published in a video game developers industry journal). At the end of the video were 2 website names, one of which directed me to 8bitpeoples. After rewatching the video, I'm fairly sure the music is from the original game, but whatever. I just figured this story was worth telling given how random my encounter with this music was. You can watch the video or read about it here: http://thenewgamer.com/content/archives/averaging_gradius
So I just embedded this flash player from Last.FM, which apparently has a shit-ton of chiptunes on it, to try and give you a taste of this stuff from the convenience of my blog. Ironically, the first song that came up after I put it up was a Venetian Snares song, which is NOT chiptunes (cool IDM, but not what I wanted). So as a disclaimer, if it doesn't sound like music you might find in an old NES game, just click the next button.
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5 comments:
Sounds interesting. I've heard about people salvaging sound cards from old videogames to make music but I wasn't aware that it comprised a specific genre. Are chiptunes original compositions or do the artists just update old game songs?
that's pretty cool. i could definitely listen to these for awhile (depending on my mood). i don't understand how the process works though. you take the sound cards, but then how do you play them? do you put them through some recording device? neat stuff!
sweet, i guess
well, alot of the people who perform this stuff do it by programming directly to the chip. For instance, there's a sequencing program that some guy wrote that you can download to a gameboy cartridge and just use the game boy controls to navigate. another technique is called "circuit bending," where pins on desired chips are randomly connected to make new sounds. that method is really popular with older keyboards, but there's alot of overlap between people who play with that technology and people who make music with old gaming consoles
It is interesting how much things can change as a result of the internet. Entirely new genres of music can be created. I wonder how populer this type of music is now and how much popularity it will gain.
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